Stuart Robinson on the Love and Wrath of God

In his reflections on the Passover, Stuart Robinson (a 19th century Kentucky Presbyterian) sticks a dagger in the heart of the assertion that God’s love precludes God’s judgment:

“The grand failure of all the arguments, which men found upon the benevolence of God, against a wrath to come upon the ungodly, occurs just here: in that it proves too much, and therefore proves nothing. If God’s benevolence must exclude the idea that he will punish, it should equally exclude the idea that he has punished; and therefore leaves unaccounted for the wrath that has come, in the attempt to prove merely imaginary the wrath that shall come. The whole history of the world’s sorrow and anguish flies in the face of this theoretic argument. The hell at which men scoff, as never to come, has already begun on earth; and but for the restraining hand of infinite goodness, preventing its full development, would have been completed long ago in a world of pure evil, with its natural consequence of pure torment, and anguish unmixed with any good or any alleviation.” (Discourses of Redemption, pp. 108-109)